


i had a dream (where you couldn't hear me screaming)

by cloudtalking



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Angst w a happy ending, Child Abuse, M/M, Neil's second year, PTSD, Post canon, Therapy cat, Violence, ft. cat!!!, fucking garbage brain being a dick and going fucking quiet, idk what this is actually called n if someone knows that'd be nice but, neil addresses his issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-04-21 09:10:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14281650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudtalking/pseuds/cloudtalking
Summary: “for the boy that’s been through war, you would think mandatory therapy sessions would be less of a hell,” andrew says. greetings for him are unnecessary, and he has never wasted words.neil breathes deeply, letting his chest visibly rise and fall, tilting his head back against the leather seat and closing his eyes. child soldiers such as he have always been better seen and not heard.





	1. down we go, wish me well

**Author's Note:**

> hi this is just me projecting meaning there is child abuse in here be warned but it's also got soft stuffs so!!

to be real is to be heard, to be believed in. neil josten lives to be real, lives to be loud. his very existence screams loud enough to shake the world underfoot. he will not be ignored. 

neil’s words leave scars, heard for months and years afterwards, the echo of his truth opening decade-old wounds. wars start at his say-so, the sound of gunshots punctuating every sentence. to be real is to be believed, and his words leave such lasting damage that the evidence of his reality is undeniable. 

neil raises both his words and his voice and the morale of his armies are raised along with them. he has changed names and forms one too many times to ever truly be defined by one of them. he is a snake; silver-tongued and venomous, he is a fox; cunning and clawed, and he is a knight; loyal and deadly. he is the reckoning, come for the heads of the empire that came before him, and one by one, they fall.

there are no kings in neil’s court, only a distant lord, and even he has been wrapped up in neil’s speeches. nothing about him has ever been more than a lie, but the lie has never before been meant to be believed. 

stefan, alex, chris; three names that never sounded true even to him. he always gave out standard lies, overused coverups. I fell down the stairs. My parents are out of town. I’m fine. they were never meant to convince anyone, just meant to be enough of an answer for any shallow questions. 

the truth of the matter was this: no one had ever cared enough to call him on the lie. 

now he has people to call him out on the regular, every lie that comes out of his mouth garners an arched brow, an unimpressed stare, an expectant silence. he has to scramble for the truth, the weight of it heavy and unfamiliar on his tongue.

it is far easier to craft convincing untruths than to give straight answers. over the years, neil has become the michelangelo of bullshiting his way out from between a rock and a hard place. 

but the war is over now. nathan wesninski is cold in the ground. riko moriyama is but a corpse; disgraced and dethroned. ichirou moriyama has given him the right to a life. the authorities he has always run from have given him a name and an identity and a social security number. he has a pack of wild animals at his back; scarred and starving, but nevertheless unconditionally loyal.

neil josten is a reality. he has a place in the world, a household name for sports fans and those who keep up with tabloids. lying is unnecessary now that his father is dead and his men scattered like roaches in a lighted room. the fox no longer needs to be so cunning, what with all the hounds put down. 

yet he still can’t find the words to give his confessions; the obituaries of past lives left unwritten. this is harder than speaking, harder than learning a language, harder than lying to keep himself alive. 

lies are honey-sweet and thick, soothing his throat raw from screams. with his covers stripped away, the wounds are left to fester. he stops himself from speaking every time, fearful of the pain it could cause. 

it’s the year after the fall of rome, and neil knows he was lost in the burning.

“you’re looking well,” bee smiles at him from her cushioned seat, mug of hot chocolate steaming in her hand.

neil focuses in on it; he remembers that mug. andrew bought it for her for her birthday, specially commissioned and imported from iceland. the purpose of the gift had escaped neil— the only special things about them were the imprints left for your fingers to slot into— but nevertheless, andrew had haggled with the artist and the studio until he had gotten a full set; three for the left hand and one for the right, as was her preference. 

“neil?” betsy asks, maybe for the first time, maybe for the second. 

he startles, stiff limbs jerking suddenly upwards; he would have spilled his own hot chocolate, had he opted to have one. 

it used to take more than that.

“i know you would rather not be here, but you might as well take advantage of it,” she says— not chastising, just imploring. “sitting in silence does nothing to help either one of us.”

he breathes through his nose, looks everywhere but at her eyes, exhales, repeats. the world slows. 

neil josten is a renowned wordsmith, turning the act of pulling stories out of his ass into an art form. it is on the nature of an artist to have an artblock.

he bites his lip. hard. breathes in through his nose. exhales. repeats. there’s a stain on bee’s wall, he wonders if she’s noticed. he blinks. it might just be him.

softly: a humming noise, agreeable in nature. that’s not what he wanted to say.

he tries again, though it takes several moments more before he can manage a sound. “maybe.” 

all at once, bee seems to straighten, adjusting her hold on her mug. neil still can’t look her in the eyes, let alone at her face.

“you don’t need to speak if you have no words to say,” she assures him. “you can nod yes or no if you need to— any body language will do.”

neil is tempted to flip her the bird just for the sake of such a perfect set up. his arms are too heavy to even tap his fingers. he doesn’t feel very assured. 

“I understand you have had quite a year since we’ve last met under these same circumstances. do you feel as though you have been handling it well enough on your own?”

it takes neil’s brain a few moments to decipher the words, to translate them into whatever language of silence it seems to have adopted. it takes another few moments to formulate and translate his response.

infitisimaly: a shrug. he’s handling it the same way he always has; pushing it back behind brick walls and waiting for the dam to break, inevitably running away from the flood before the waves can crash down on his back. he’s not very good at swimming. 

in other words: it’s going as well as can be expected for a soldier out of war.

bee shifts in her seat again, settling in deeper. it is going to be a long session.

the remaining half an hour is spent much the same: bee asks a question. neil takes a minute or so to process. he moves microscopically and slow as life. bee takes another minute or so to confirm that that miniscule adjustment was his response. she replies. it repeats.

when bee finally announces that their time is up, neil realizes he’s been zoning with his gaze on the minute hand of the clock, not even registering the passage of time by watching it move. 

it should feel like liberation, but neil feels no inclination to move. eventually, after several stolen moments that may have added up to more than a minute, he slowly moves to his feet and drags his steps on the carpet as he exits.

he manages to nod at her before exiting, not trusting himself with even a one-syllable farewell. she smiles and nods in return.

that much, at least, isn’t a loss. 

he falls harshly into the shotgun seat of the maserati, body heavy with words left half-formed and unspoken.

“for the boy that’s been through war, you would think mandatory therapy sessions would be less of a hell,” andrew says. greetings for him are unnecessary, and he has never wasted words.

neil breathes deeply, letting his chest visibly rise and fall, tilting his head back against the leather seat and closing his eyes. child soldiers such as he have always been better seen and not heard.


	2. i wanna tell you what my truth is (but it's buried down inside)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this is where the graphic depiction of child abuse is but also where the resolution is so!!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i forgot to put this in the first chapter lmao but all these titles are from dream by bishop briggs

neil’s earliest memory of his mother’s ire is this: there is food on the table. he is sitting on a seat too low to truly raise him enough to properly reach the table, though as a child he is bouncing energetically enough that every few seconds he might be. he is sitting adjacent to his mother and diagonally from his father. he is talking about something he’s been waiting more than a day to talk his tongue numb about. 

 

this babbling is aimed at his mother, an island in a hurricane, a sanctuary in a war zone. to him, she’s all the safety he has ever had and has ever known.

 

he very rarely smiled as a child, but he is now; the grin is alien on his face, lighting up his eyes like a lantern in caverns seldom explored— very nearly unrecognizable. 

 

mary wesninski turns to her son, tired eyes disturbed by the lights in his own. the sudden flash startles the demons hiding there, bats waking violently and flying forwards, knocking flashlights out of the hands of excitable adventurers.

 

mary wesninski turns to her son and backhands him hard enough to send him toppling off the chair and wiping the smile from his mouth. his eyes are wide and his pupils small; a deer realizing for the first time that there is more than one pack of wolves in the forest, a child realizing that he is alone. 

 

“shut up,” she says. exhausted, regretful. he makes himself believe that in her words are an apology, somewhere hidden behind the harsh words and violent eyes. the skin under his eye starts to bleed from the bite of her nails against his skin, the rest of his cheek bright red from the impact, bearing the imprint of a mother’s touch.

 

he shuts up.

 

his sanctuary is still the only one he has, the only place he can turn to. it’s just that now he can smell the smoke and tell that it is burning. 

 

later, when his name is no longer nathaniel or abram, when he is oceans away from his father, the fire is allowed to burn uninterrupted.

 

he’s ten years old and learning french, head swimming with verbs of the past and present tenses and unable to tell the difference between plural and singular pronouns. 

 

his mother asks him a question, her words looping and round. her new name is the same way; pretentious and ancient. they sound like they require calligraphy to be put onto paper, and his handwriting has never been up to par. 

 

he tries to make sense of her speech, though he only recognizes the words for book and study. he elects to say:  _ non _ . it’s one of the only two words he knows for sure.

 

it’s the wrong answer. she teaches him what the consequences for being wrong are without use of any words at all, picking up one of his textbooks and sending him sprawling.

 

he learns the right answer is often just this: be quiet.

 

the world is larger than anyone knows, languages and common slang change for every area code. some things, however, are universal. a yes or no answer can just as easily be determined by a slight movement of the head. an arrangement of shallow words can be exchanged for a gesture equally as noncommittal. 

 

most of his contributions to the world are shrugs and hums and one word answers. he never speaks unless spoken to and never makes enough friends to be spoken to often at all. no one has to notice how his french sounds like his grade-school spanish, how his german phonetics are too-often swapped for english, how his first response is almost always in his mother’s accent.

 

( _ i’m fine _ . is a relatively short phrase in most languages. even he can’t fuck that up.)

 

every time he slips up, his mother punctuates her reprimand with her fists. they can’t afford for slip ups.

 

last year, he had been neil josten, and neil josten had never had a mother. mary has died along with his last I.D. he was free to say whatever he wanted as long as it kept him alive.

 

and so, like a child outside of an overbearing household for the first time, he overdid it. every time he opened his mouth was another epic worthy spiel, another ocean full of lies. quiet is violent, a reminder that neil was born alone, so he fills it with whatever he can until he can’t remember anymore.

 

except over the last year that void has been filled by other things. he has a family now, full of people he would die for in a heartbeat, full of people who would just as soon do the same. he’s not sure he can ever truly be alone again, hazel eyes and pale skin tied so tightly to his heart that nothing can ever fully wash them out. 

 

he doesn’t need to talk to survive anymore. that’s the problem. the real damage is only ever assessable after the war. 

 

andrew pulls into fox tower wordlessly, parking in his usual spot and climbing out of the car. neil follows him into the tower and onto the roof for a smoke. he’s never needed the nicotine, but on days like this he feels as though he might.

 

looking down at the campus below has always put neil at ease. this is andrew’s fear— not the height, but falling from it. andrew does everything in his power to protect himself and those he cares about, familiarizing himself with knives and mob politics. there is nothing he can do to thwart the pull of gravity, a fact that he is reminded of every time he is high enough for it to hurt. 

 

andrew needs the roof to feel, needs the height for fear, needs the cigarettes to calm him. the roof, more than one hundred feet in the air, grounds him better than anything at sea level. it anchors neil too, the confirmation that andrew feels. it helps him to know that  _ this is nothing _ is a lie, that andrew brings neil up with him because neil makes him feel too, and that is altogether scarier than the height.

 

neil knows the problem with falling is the helplessness of it. andrew lives his life as a solo act, and one man cannot break his own fall. neil promises himself that if andrew ever truly falls, he will be the one to catch him. 

 

andrew lights two cigarettes and hands one to neil. he takes a drag, long and slow, like he’s steeling himself. 

 

“what was that?” andrew asks.

 

“what was what?”

 

“back at bee’s. your list of issues is already so long. i’m not so sure there’s room for a phobia of therapists.”

 

“it’s not that,” neil says.

 

“what was it then?”

 

neil opens his mouth to answer, but there are no words on his tongue. he closes it. his heart picks up, snowballing and picking up speed for every second the words evade him.  _ not again _ .

 

andrew waits, staring blankly as he takes another drag. neil tries his best to keep his breathing under control. he digs his nails into the skin of his arms. hard.

 

“you’re having a panic attack,” andrew notes, raising an eyebrow.

 

neil hugs his legs close to his chest and rocks himself back and forth. “fuck off,” he says, much too softly for it to come out how he wants.

 

andrew moves carefully, his hand reaching around neil’s back to clasp around his neck, face barely three inches from his own. “neil, breathe.”

 

he does, though it takes a while to do so consistently. andrew doesn’t let go until he knows for sure neil is no longer at risk at falling back into hyperventilating, and even then he only really loosens his grip. 

 

the point of contact anchors neil enough that he finds it in himself to calm down. he waits a bit longer before responding, if only because that’s how long it takes him to find the words.

 

_ every time i try to talk my voice escapes me. after all these years of lying I can’t find a single truth to tell. every time I think of something important I lose the words to describe it. _

 

“my brain.” neil gestures towards his head. “every time I try to talk, it just— goes quiet.”

 

andrew nods as if that makes sense. neil’s brain screams mutiny at that, wanting to throw something or himself off the edge of the roof. how can andrew be so understanding when neil himself is lost for words?

 

“don’t rush it,” andrew says, adjusting to a more comfortable position on the roof.

 

he tries his best. breathes in. looks to the sky.

 

neil has always loved flying, always loved the sky. on the run, safety is relative, and anywhere was safer than baltimore. it was a matter of distance from his father, and neil never felt father from his father than when he found himself amongst the clouds.

 

he exhales. 

 

“i think I’m—“ he stops, searching his brain. “getting worse.”

 

“you didn’t need to take so much time to figure that out, a blind man could’ve told you.”

 

“fuck off,” he says, because those words are always close at hand.

 

“bee can help, if you let her,” andrew adds, not for the first time.

 

“i don’t want help.” neil uses what he can of andrew’s words, easier to plagiarize than to come up with anything his own.

 

“then what do you want?”

 

he’s tempted to say nothing, just to see how andrew will  react. but that is lie, and lying is the problem.

 

“i want to be a real person,” neil says finally, after rehearsing it for over minute. “i’m not so sure I can be.”

 

“why? you’ve fought for this, and now you’re giving it up?” andrew scoffs.

 

neil’s fists clench hard enough to leave marks in the skin of his palm. “no,” he hisses, the two-letter word another member of his quick-fire arsenal. 

 

the rest of the words that come need time. andrew lets him have it.

 

andrew minyard is the man who locked his own brother in a withdrawal-proofed bathroom and made him quit cold turkey, the man who fed matt speedballs just so his fall wouldn’t be drawn out, the man who promised kevin to free him from his abusers and did it in less than two years, doing the same for neil in one.

 

this is not a man who waits for anything, but he waits for neil.

 

“i can’t talk anymore. how am i supposed to become real if i can’t tell the truth?”

 

“you’re talking now.”

 

neil glares at him.

 

“make another deal with me,” andrew says, as if something like that can just be said out loud and not carved into stone, as if those words come without the promise of mountains moving beneath their feet.

 

“another deal?”

 

“you want to be real? i’ll make sure you are. you want to talk again? i’ll make sure you do.”

 

neil swallows around the knife in his throat, cutting into his esophagus and stopping him from speaking. he dips his head and nods at andrew;  _ go on.  _

 

“you have to promise to listen to me, to take my advice instead of ignoring it. that means seeing bee and actually talking. that means taking breaks when i tell you you need to. if i tell you to stand down, you stand down. it means that you have to accept my help and that you have to try to help yourself as well.”

 

neil’s face is a picture of uncertainty, the song andrew sings still sounding off-key. 

 

“if you don’t agree with something I say you can talk to me about it, and if you absolutely need to say no you can say no, but you need to try,” andrew reiterates. “there’s no point in helping you if you won’t help yourself.”

 

neil nods, but still stares at andrew, waiting.

 

“what else do you need to hear?” andrew asks. “i won’t repeat myself just because you’re an idiot. at least try to keep up.” 

 

he gestures at andrew, then at everything, entirely too vague. the marvel is that he gets it, that he knows neil and his facial expressions well enough to add those to the context clues. 

 

neil isn’t in a situation where he should be able to find a bright side, but knowing andrew had changed that. andrew was the silver lining in a world where neil was living only to die. in this world, he is the entire sun.

 

“in return, you will join renee and i on sundays,” andrew says after considering neil’s wordless inquiry. 

 

neil winces, but nods. “deal.”

 

andrew nods as well and hands him a lit cigarette. neil takes a drag and then fits it into the spot between his index and middle finger where it will stay until it burns out.

 

he inhales the smoke. exhales. his vows to his mother were similarly binding verbal contracts, words carving themselves into his bones;  _ sunrise. abram. death. keep running. don’t stop. don’t form attachments. don’t play exy. never look back. _

 

deals are only so good as the benefits reaped by both parties, and survival isn’t worth losing this. now he knows the two are not mutually exclusive. he will bury the lies of the past and learn to preach truth as neil josten.

 

he will learn to be real. he will learn to be heard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my boys,,,, being healthy,,,, communicating,,,, I'm love


	3. i wanna wake up where your love is ('cause your love is always breaking mine)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> cats!! cats!! soft n fluffy!! not angst!!! happy resolution!! wow!!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi i had to add cute things here it is this is my yearly good deed

neil is used to andrew burning rubber in the maserati, grabbing neil and pushing the gas hard enough to remind neil of a car chase as he drives like horsepower alone will help him outrun his demons.

 

neil is the perfect example of just how well that works, but andrew doesn’t need to win the race, he just needs to feel the adrenaline. he just needs to feel.

 

this isn’t that.

 

andrew on a rampage cuts an aimless path through the south carolinian countryside, marked by a trail of skidmarks and a exhaust. 

 

this is andrew on a mission; looking up at road signs, obeying laws of traffic, pulling onto the main highways.

 

neil taps his fingers on the knuckles of the hand he’s holding between the seats. “where are we going?”

 

andrew keeps his eyes on the road, burning holes into the rear of the BMW in front of them. “nowhere, at this rate.”

 

neil has to agree. they’ve been in traffic long enough for neil to outlast one of his quiet days, a phenomenon that has happened often enough to gain a title.

 

if it isn’t easy enough to tell that neil is running out of words simply because he’s not already throwing them at the nearest target, andrew and neil now have a system.

 

when neil knows he is running low, he finds andrew as soon as he can, no matter where he is. andrew drops everything to tend to neil.

 

neil feels guilty about it, feels selfish. andrew has better things to do than to cater to someone who is too weak to function on his own. but this was the first decree in the name of their new deal: if neil is having a bad day, he must tell andrew the second he knows.

 

once he does, they find a way to be alone, find a way to escape to their dorms or to columbia. anywhere where neil can breathe easy and know no one else is around to see his weakness, no one can hurt him when he can’t fight back.

 

he curls up next to andrew on the couch or on their bed, holding his hand and anything else andrew will allow. 

 

physical contact anchors neil and throws andrew off-balance. together, they are magnets of the same charge, trying to force closer together but only pushing each other farther away. 

 

andrew makes a turn onto an exit that saves them both from snapping out of boredom, leading them through the backroads.

 

andrew pulls out his phone and holds it out to neil. “i doubt even you are so hopeless that you can’t type in an address.”

 

neil takes his phone, typing in the password— the day he met aaron— and opening up the maps app. “what is it?”

 

andrew rattles it off and neil enters it in, presses start, and hands it back to andrew to put in the holder attached to the dashboard. 

 

immediately: the orders to make a U-turn and start heading back towards the highway.

 

andrew glares at his phone with more hate than neil has ever seen before in his gaze. neil is honestly surprised it doesn’t burst into flame. “fuck off.”

 

“yeah,” neil says, raising a fist in encouragement. “you tell her! fuck the system! she’s controlled our lives for long enough!”

 

andrew redirects his glare at neil. neil beams back at him, full force. 

 

andrew keeps driving until the disembodied valley-girl changes directions to the highway to another, less cluttered road. neil sighs and slouches back in his seat.

 

“we should go on a road trip,” neil says, staring up at the roof of the car. “just us— no backseat drivers or bitchy GPSs. no one to tell us what to do or where to go, just driving.”

 

“sounds a lot like running away.”

 

neil shakes his head. “i wouldn’t be running away, you’d be there with me. there would be nothing to leave behind.”

 

andrew’s entire body stills, full stop. “you’re a problem.”

 

“so i’ve been told.” neil shrugs. “I was raised wrong.”

 

they arrive at andrew’s mystery destination a half an hour later; three hours away from palmetto state. 

 

it isn’t much: a light blue house in a suburban development community with a hundred or so carbon copies lined up side-by-side. 

 

neil raises an eyebrow. “what real housewives episode is this?”

 

“the one where you shut the fuck up,” Andrew says, and gets out of the car.

 

a woman answers the door; hair cut short and a gray vest over a long sleeved t-shirt. soccer mom.

 

“oh, hello! are you here about the persians?” she greets them, plastic smile on her face. neil’s brain immediately takes a detour to a late night documentary kevin made him watch. he looks to andrew in confusion. 

 

andrew nods, causing her to sigh and for neil to become even further confused.

 

“i’m sorry, but all we have left is the runt of the litter.” she shakes her head, sighing again. Neil wonders if she even knows how to breathe normally at all. “i’m an accomplished breeder, my cats often go on to win worldwide competitions, but there is always one that comes out wrong. it’s an occupational hazard in this field, you know. there’s always a dud.”

 

“we’ll take the runt,” andrew says, already pulling out his  wallet.

 

“oh no, i couldn’t possibly. an artist would never sell a work she was unsatisfied with—“

 

“you make cats have sex for a living,” andrew deadpans, holding out a stack of large bills. “we’ll take the runt.”

 

she takes the stack. they take the runt.

 

neil likes animals well enough. in his experience, they’re usually either disease ridden or covered in bugs or both, but he would always tear off bits of food for the strays he found in alleyways. 

 

this is not an alley cat. this is the worst of a litter is prized showcats, bred only to be the best. 

 

sadly, neil can relate. 

 

“why?” he asks when andrew holds the kitten out for him to take.

 

“you need more friends,” andrew replies. “ones you don’t need to talk to to keep. ones that don’t have problems with touch.”

 

neil takes the runt. it’s soft and warm in his hands, mewling softly. 

 

“oh.” neil whispers, holding it closer to his chest. “i love it.”

 

“it’s a she,” andrew corrects.

 

“does she have a name?” 

 

“runt.”

 

neil shakes his head. “no, that’s your nickname. too confusing.”

 

“and I suppose you have something better?” andrew drawls, climbing into the car. neil jumps into the shotgun seat after him, kitten still in his arms.

 

“of course,” neil says, already knowing the perfect answer. “king fluffikins.”

 

a beat of silence passes. “you did hear me when i said it is a she, right?”

 

“yep.” neil nods.

 

andrew stares at him for a moment longer, then turns his attentions back to the road. “idiot.”

 

neil grins at him, then refocuses it down on the royalty in his arms for the rest of the ride. if his voice goes up an octave or two when fawning over her, then no one else in the world will ever have to know. 

 

if andrew tears his eyes off the cars in front of him a few times during traffic just to stare at the sight, no one will be the wiser. 

 

if neil kisses andrew across the seats, if he mouths his thanks against chapped lips, if he only pulls away to marvel at the kitten in his lap, then it is just between the three of them. 

 

neil josten is a real person. he has a real boyfriend named andrew minyard who is a fake blonde. he has a real kitten in his arms with a real ridiculous name that helps him get through bad days and therapy sessions. he has real identification and documents and a real social security number. 

 

to be real is to be believed in. to be a fact for others to place trust in. to be true. 

 

here, cutting through the south carolinian countryside in a maserati with a kitten in his arms and his boyfriend in the driver’s seat, neil feels plenty real.

 

one day, he may even be real enough to say the three little words that andrew means in all of his actions. he might be able to voice what he has been trying to say all along, with kept promises and shared secrets. for now, this is enough. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yo this was a fun time thanks for coming to my projection corner and TED talk u can yell at me at @twnyards on the hellsite!!

**Author's Note:**

> it ends happy trust


End file.
